SEO Tools Showdown: SEMrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz Pro vs SpyFu

Give a quick Google search on the terms ‘Best SEO Tools’ and you’ll get articles in SERPs featuring one or all of these tools – SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SpyFu. In this article, we’ll put each of these tools under the microscope and help you decide whether it’s worth investing in them.

For all these tools, we’ll reveal their key features, pros and cons, pricing, and ratings on popular reviews sites such as G2Crowd, TrustRadius, and Capterra.

SEMrush is the world’s leading competitive research service for online marketing and one of the most popular SEO tools in the market. SEMrush allows you to do keyword research, spy on your competition’s SEO and PPC strategies, do backlink analysis, and much more.

Key Features

For the complete list of SEMrush features, refer to this page. Listed below are some of the tool’s key features:

See competitors’ best keywords

Discover new organic competitors

Observe position changes of domains

Uncover your competitors’ ad strategies and budget

Conduct a deep backlink analysis

Find the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns

Gather phrase matches and related keywords

Get long tail keywords

Find keywords with less competition

Set side-by-side domains’ comparisons

Gather all the SEMrush data in one custom PDF report

Pros

The best competitive intelligence tool. Helps you uncover your competitors’ SEO as well as PPC strategies.

Site Audit feature helps you identify and fix on-page and technical SEO errors on your website.

Excellent keyword research tool.

Drag and drop report builder.

Cons

A steep learning curve.

Backlink analysis is still in beta mode. Nowhere near as precise as Ahrefs.

Pricing

Pro – $99.95/Month (Ideal for beginners and bloggers)

Guru – $199.95/Month (Ideal for small business owners and solopreneurs)

Business – $399.95/Month (Ideal for marketing agencies and marketing teams in big companies)

Ratings

Final Verdict

If you had to choose just one service out of these four, go for SEMrush. SEMrush is the ultimate SEO tool which helps you unravel the most profitable keywords for your business or blog, and helps you gain a deeper understanding of your competitors’ search and PPC tactics to rank higher in SERPs.

If you’re serious about building high quality backlinks for your site, Ahrefs is the tool you should invest in. Ahrefs has the best link index among all SEO tools. You can use this tool to unearth your competitors’ backlink profile and build your own backlinks.

Started by Rand Fishkin aka the Wizard of Moz back in 2004, Moz is perhaps the most popular SEO tool in this list, owing to the cult-like popularity of Fishkin. Moz relies heavily on SEO metrics such as Domain Authority and Page Authority to give you insights on link equity, keyword rankings, page optimization reports, and more.

Key Features

For the full list of features, refer to this page. Here are some of the key features of Moz Pro you should know about:

Pricing

Ratings

Final Verdict

SpyFu is a decent competitive research and keyword analysis tool. With plans starting at $39/month, it is also one of the most competitively priced SEO products in the market. Having said that, the tool certainly has limitations. The data you get is not always accurate and the UI can be a bit overwhelming at times. But if you want a reliable SEO tool that is not too heavy on the pocket, you should try SpyFu.

I’ve tried them all. But I agree Semrush seems to be the best overall tool if you only have the budget (or the time) to choose one. I’ve also tried Moz several times, but have never really warmed up to it for my purposes. I find Semrush is just way faster and easier for me to use for the purposes I use it for. (The learning curve was kind of steep too in the beginning – I’m still not what you’d call a power user

I’m trying all of them right now to see which I’ll subscribe to and it seems like they all differ wildly in results for the same searches with ahrefs being way ahead of the pack in my experience. I do wish ahrefs had a better on-page SEO tool like SEMRush and Moz though. Thinking of doing the base plans on ahrefs and Moz Pro combined and ditching SEMRush before renewal.

I came across this page because I was looking for the best SEO tool to use and which would be my money’s worth. SEMrush is definitely number especially when it comes to keywords research. But for backlink analysis, nothing beats Ahrefs. That’s my opinion. Based on my research, Ahrefs is useful for backlink analysis and link building. I like the pros and cons you put in the article. I found that helpful. It made me understand which tool to get.

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About me

Hi there! I’m Sandeep Mallya, the owner of 99signals. I’m also the founder/CEO of Startup Cafe Digital, an inbound marketing agency in Bangalore.

I’ve been an active member of the startup community, having worked with several early stage entrepreneurs in India, USA, and Singapore. My agency was featured among “Top 10 Marketing Agencies in India in 2016” by Silicon India.

99signals is my personal blog. It is focused on SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. The goal of this site is simple: to share inbound marketing strategies that have enabled me to build a successful online business. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…

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ABOUT ME

Hi there! I’m Sandeep Mallya, the owner of 99signals. I’m also the founder/CEO of Startup Cafe Digital, an inbound marketing agency in Bangalore.

I’ve been an active member of the startup community, having worked with several early stage entrepreneurs in India, USA, and Singapore. My agency was featured among “Top 10 Marketing Agencies in India in 2016” by Silicon India.

99signals is my personal blog. It is focused on SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. The goal of this site is simple: to share inbound marketing strategies that have enabled me to build a successful online business. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…

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Welcome to 99signals.com – an SEO and inbound marketing blog which helps professional marketers and bloggers achieve higher search engine rankings and greater traffic. We do this by writing in-depth articles, how-to guides, tutorials, and reviews on inbound marketing strategies and tools.